The framers of the US constitution were remarkably prescient about a number of things, but my guess is that they did not anticipate gerrymandering, or at least its effectiveness. I would be very interested to hear otherwise.
There's a significant difference in the modern era in that gerrymandering can be much more precise. The 2010 districts the Republicans drew in several states are very sophisticated works of statistics, GIS, and political science. I fear what machine learning techniques are going to do in 2020.
Also, I think it's partly because at the country's founding, most hot political issues had a clear large-scale geographic distribution, and so geographic districts were considered an adequate way to capture the overall mood.